Wednesday, March 28, 2007

And now for something completely different...

My last couple of posts have been heavy and long, so I'll give the five of you a break, now, with something trivial and short:

I discovered the other day that the plural of the word "chassis" is spelled the same as the singular: chassis. However, they are pronounced differently: "CHAS-ee" for the singular and "CHAS-eez" for the plural. So if you're reading aloud and you come to "chassis," how do you know which pronounciation to use? The singular or the plural? I can imagine situations where it's not obvious from the context.

That is interesting! I wonder if it is common for words to work their way out of the language due to such confusions...people tend to avoid them and eventually they go away?

Do you listen to car talk? They had an interesting puzzler a few weeks ago: name a word and its plural that do not share any letters in common. The only clue is that the singular of this word is very common while the plural is archaic. It is, however, in dictionary.com. I just looked it up.